poems to reach for…

Glovebox Poems is a small imprint making zines and collections of poetry. Titles are available at independent book sellers.Click the covers to find them via Indiebound.

The poems in The End of America, Book Three act like lightning rods for the many types of experience, cultural and political and personal, that make up life in southern California. The poems’ jagged structures reveal the ways that different kinds of information collide. Both resident and stranger, the narrator sees, with an outsider’s fresh eye, the forces large scale and small that affect him and others in the small coastal town, Carlsbad, where he has come to live.

The End of America
is a long, multi-book work, pieces from which have been appearing in
various literary magazines and small books and chapbooks over the last
decade. Each book makes a different use of poetic forms to explore the
cultural and political conditions of life in southern California and
its connection to the rest of California and beyond.

Panic’s Hymn, a reissue / reimagining of the 2005 book Cadillac Battleship, is a book about grief as related to physical trauma–how love & marriage might survive this pain & devastation. In reimagining the book, 5 (or so) poems were removed, as they were problematic in that they directed the hostility of the speaker’s pain toward women; this simply did not serve the poetry &, rather, obscured the book’s lamentation. In addition, some small edits to a few poems were made, merely for the sake of image clarity & with the intention of not disrupting the speaker’s voice or POV.

Panic’s Hymn is unflinchingly honest, presenting & facing the reality of pain & its related sadness– to discover hope through the psyche’s transformation.

If poems are meant to share experience, and create shared events, reading’s a unification that can be similar to loss: an experience for everyone. Carry On is a chapbook of twenty-five poems on loss, gathering of what isn’t gone, and what’s changed. “We are never alone in any event,” is a reminder in the title poem, that the death of an entity–individual, an era, status, art, mechanism, monument, or rite–is also an opening.

This is the 2nd edition of this chapbook, revisited and recreated in the aftermath of the abrupt shutting of a small press. In “Returning,” Deutsch writes, “I’ve wasted the last four years…Bees escape plants without flowers.”